Explanation: What shines
in the gamma-ray sky?
The most complete answer yet to that question is offered by the
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's
first all-sky catalog.
Fermi's sources
of cosmic
gamma-rays feature nature's most energetic
particle
accelerators,
ultimately producing 100 MeV to 100 GeV photons, photons with
more than 50 million to 50 billion times the
energy
of visible light.
Distilled from 11 months of sky survey data using Fermi's Large Area
Telescope (LAT), the 1,451 cataloged sources include energetic
star burst galaxies
and active galactic nuclei (AGN)
far beyond the Milky Way.
But within our own galaxy are
many pulsars (PSR)
and
pulsar wind nebulae (PWN),
supernova remnants (SNR),
x-ray binary stars (HXB) and
micro-quasars
(MQO).
Fermi's all sky map is shown centered on the Milky Way
with the diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Galactic plane
running horizontally through the frame.
To locate the cataloged gamma-ray sources,
just slide your cursor over the map.
For now, 630 of the
sources cataloged at gamma-ray energies
remain otherwise unidentified, not associated with sources detected
at lower energies.